Editors' Introduction to Issue 1Welcome to the inaugural issue of MONSTRUM, a forum for scholars of the macabre, the monstrous, the sensational, exploitation, dark speculation, and all sorts of other critical subversions of reality as we know and accept it. Published in Montréal by a scholarly community called the Montréal Monstrum Society (MMS), MONSTRUM is an open-access, blind peer-reviewed, ISSN-listed publication. We are proud to provide a forum for established and developing scholars, as well as undergraduate and college-level students in our "Student Forum."

All content is available in downloadable PDFs. Scroll down to browse the contents of Issue 1.

MONSTRUM, Issue 1, kicks off with a critical retrospective on the career of American filmmaker George A. Romero, with fourteen scholars covering Romero's sixteen-film career. Five feature essays follow, covering varied topics. Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare discusses how the "southern question" in Italy generated a shared attractions sensibility between two Italian masters of cinema. Gary D. Rhodes' work traces how the term "horror film" came to be in 1930s writing on cinema. Virginie Selavy's study of Michael Powell's game-changing Peeping Tom challenges the psychoanalytical frameworks most often associated with (and encouraged by) the film. Michael Wood discusses the parallels and shared context regarding two of Hammer Studios' 1960s occult films, one of them largely forgotten. And Kristopher Woofter looks at the radical politics and subversion of factual discourse in the horror pseudo-documentary The Hellstrom Chronicle.

​Book reviews of Alanna Thain's Bodies in Suspense: Time and Affect in Cinema (2017) and Patricia Pender's I'm Buffy and You're History: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Contemporary Feminism (2016) follow. And, as part of MONSTRUM's commitment to developing scholars, the issue is rounded out by V. Samoylenko's work, critiquing the ways David Robert Mitchell's critically lauded 2015 film, It Follows, openly defies the paranoid stigmas attached to sexually-transmitted infections (STIs).

MONSTRUM operates under the stewardship of co-editors Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare and Kristopher Woofter, and is supported by aneditorial boardof respected scholars in horror and related fields. We thank our collaborators, instructors, contributors and peer reviewers for making this inaugural issue possible.

In July 2017, American cinema lost one of its masters. This feature includes critical reflections by a number of scholars on all of Romero's films, from Night of the Living Dead to Survival of the Dead.​Edited by Kristopher Woofter​​Contributors: Stacey Abbott, Simon Brown, Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare, Clayton Dillard, Will Dodson, Lorna Jowett, Adam Lowenstein, R. Million, Carl Sederholm, Christopher Sharrett, J.A. Shea, Annaëlle Winand, Tony Williams, Kristopher Woofter